On 10/24/07, Lonnie Olson <lists at kittypee.com> wrote:
> Right, using UDP as a base is a very bad idea. But writing your own
> transport layer protocol is difficult. There are many applications that
> don't do well on TCP, or UDP. Examine the progress of SCTP. It has
> many new features. Is it widely supported now? No, it's not.
UDP was designed to be used for experimental transports like the one
suggested here. Using something other than UDP as the basis for an
experimental protocol would almost certainly cause every router in the
world to drop your packets. This is part of why SCTP isn't widely
supported. There are a large number of protocols which essentially
implement their own transport on top of UDP. RTP is one good example,
it implements features that it needs without incurring the full
overhead of TCP.